Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
After studying online marketing for a few years; I experienced a dramatic realization.
Well, sort of…
The realization that traffic generation is ridiculously simple. I realized how the greater majority of Internet Marketers overplay how difficult it is to generate traffic.
It’s part of their ingenious plan to keep newbie Internet Marketers newbies. By making it appear complex, they make you believe it’s difficult and therefore your brain starts to believe it and you struggle.
So dismiss any beliefs you have about traffic generation being difficult. It really isn’t; it’s just a science that can’t fail if you follow the rules. Here are 7 powerfully unique ways to generate more traffic:
1. Tweak Your Design
The first and most instantly gratifying strategy is to tweak your design. Design matters, anyone who tells you otherwise is missing out on a lot of traffic. The longer people remain on your website; the more likely they are to share your content, return, refer others or subscribe to your email list.
In other words; the longer avg. time per visit spent on your site; the more traffic you’ll generate. And… One of the key metrics for keeping people on your site is design. The better your design, the more attractive your site and the more likely visitors will stick around to read your content.
2. Write Some Killer Content
Once you have people sticking around, give them with a reason to stay. Write timeless EPIC content. You can write ultimate guides to X, big lists or even publish interviews. Whatever applies most to your site, write timeless content that you can showcase to new visitors.
The better your content, the more readers will subscribe. Need I say more?
3. Create A Free Product
Creating a free info-product is one of the more complex ways to drive traffic. By creating a free product and offering it to visitors; you’ll build an email list, encourage repeat visitors, build rapport with readers and gain referral traffic.
4. Run Ads
Obviously the most guaranteed way to generate traffic is to pay for it. Facebook ads, Bing ads, PPC, banner ads and more. If you’re trying to drive traffic to a paid offer or service; it’s the best way to go without a doubt.
But what I find funny is that nobody is telling bloggers to use paid traffic to build their audience. Since you can’t really put a price tag on each blog subscriber; bloggers are afraid of running paid ads.
However, if you drive paid traffic to your free product and ask them to subscribe to your blog + follow you on Facebook in order to download it; you’ll build an incredibly loyal and trusting audience.
5. Run Competitions
Running competitions is one of the more creative and unique ways of generating more traffic; but it works well. I’ve done some crazy numbers with competitions; giving away as little as 10 copies of a product of mine.
While running competitions is one of the easier ways of boosting traffic, it requires an audience. It’s also easiest to do when you have an actual product to give away.
It’s simple. Pick one of your products or if you don’t have one; use someone else’s. I’ve even seen people run competitions successfully giving away a few books. Once you have something to give away, setup a competition on Punch Tab (Broken, try Plato instead). Punch Tab allows you to quickly run competitions for just about anything.
You were never meant to do this alone
Reading this changes nothing. Doing it with people who show up changes everything. That is the whole difference between the people who transform and the people who keep starting over.
Start free →You send it out or write a blog post about the competition, your readers, visitors and subscribers enter and you draw random entries at the end to give the free product/s to. (You control all the metrics like number of products to give away and days to run the competition for)
Where’s the traffic coming from? That’s the interesting part. In order to enter the competition; people have to like your page on Facebook, Tweet it and share it on Google Plus. Basically every time someone enters your competition; they share it with all their friends resulting in lots of traffic.
Within Punch Tab you can control where the traffic gets sent to; powerful stuff.
6. Steal Traffic From Blogs
Stealing traffic from blogs is one of the fastest ways of building a real community, a list of subscribers and driving traffic. You can steal traffic by commenting and guest posting on other blogs in your niche.
7. Review A Product
Reviewing products is a sure-fire way of generating long term traffic and making affiliate commissions. Whenever I go to buy something online, the first thing I do is search for reviews. Try to make it a monthly thing to review a product in your niche.
Don’t think you’ll get harassed by your readers if you start pitching products; many of them are desperate for honest product reviews, for stuff that works.
In Prosperity,
David Wood
P.S. Leave me your thoughts, comments and questions below. Also opt-in to the email list on the right for more traffic generation tips, tricks and secrets.
Comments (carried over from the previous site)
Aaron Kramer, September 12 2012, 00:02
Kramer approves. Good to see you are using livefyre here too 😉
Most Darren, September 12 2012, 12:28
Nice post. Thanks for the tip about PunchTab. The only thing I wonder about is how effective are contests at bringing in people who are really interested in your service? Sure, most people will sign up for something free or a chance to win, but do they stick around after the contest is over?
Sue Tamani, September 12 2012, 12:28
Hi David, Another post full of great simple ideas and easy examples for anyone to follow! Thanks. I found this post when I was checking on my Tribepro account and saw you syndicating it there. I don’t know when you or someone last checked, but I would love to auto-syndicate you, just as soon as you turn on yours! LOL You are showing as a PRO but auto-syndicating to no locations. You better sack someone, mate! Best Regards Sue
Tyronne Ratcliff, September 12 2012, 12:28
Doing product reviews seem to work really well and can be an effective way to “presell” your visitors before sending them to a sales page with an option to buy. I haven’t ran paid ads before but it seems like it would a better way to find those “buyers keywords” that everybody’s talking about all the time.
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Strongest case against tip 6, since nobody’s making it here: ‘steal traffic from blogs’ by commenting and guest posting is probably the single most saturated tactic on this list. Every reader of this post is going to try leaving comments on the same twenty popular marketing blogs this week. That’s not really a traffic strategy, it’s a queue.
A queue with everyone holding the same number.
The design point in tip 1 is probably universal, but tip 4’s whole scenario assumes a market big enough that ‘being everywhere for a week’ actually registers as a pattern to anyone watching. In my town, spreading a fixed ad budget across a week or across three months looks identical from the customer’s side, because there’s maybe four hundred people in my target market total and they already know who I am from the feed store, the church parking lot, and the two other places in town people actually run into each other. Frequency doesn’t buy you anything new when the awareness problem was never really there to begin with.
What’s the actual cost per lead in that market versus a city one, Lonnie, before crediting the size difference over something else?
I think what’s being missed in a thread leaning hard on the ad and competition tactics is that tips 1 and 2, design and genuinely good content, are the only two on this list that actually compound over time rather than resetting to zero the moment you stop paying attention to them. A competition ends the day it ends, and most of those entrants never come back. An ad stops the moment you stop paying for it, full stop, no residue. A genuinely useful guide written three years ago is still quietly bringing people in today with nobody touching it, still getting shared, still getting linked to by people who found it on their own. Slower to build, obviously, and it doesn’t give you the dopamine hit of watching a competition counter climb in real time. But it’s the only traffic on this whole list you don’t have to keep re-buying every single month just to keep it flowing.
Spent two decades in a building where ‘be everywhere at once’ was the entire annual marketing strategy, executed as one enormous fourth-quarter push followed by nine months of silence while everyone recovered from it. Reading tip 3 here is oddly nostalgic. It works, in the sense that people notice you, it just doesn’t distinguish between being noticed and being trusted, which corporate life taught me the hard way are not the same purchase.
That distinction between noticed and trusted is the one that gets me, Graham, because my instinct reading tip 3 is to try to be ‘everywhere’ properly — a video channel, a podcast, guest posts, all launched at once so nothing looks half-finished. Which is exactly how I’ve ended up with four projects that never shipped. Everywhere, badly, at once might be worse than picking two things and finishing them.
Sorry if this is a silly question, but the post recommends Punch Tab for competitions and then the note under it says that’s broken now and to try something else instead — has anyone here actually run a competition recently with whatever the current tool is? I don’t want to build something around a service that no longer exists.
Giving away ten copies of something to get a mob of prize-hunters to like your page and tweet it isn’t audience-building, it’s rented attention with an expiry date the day the competition ends. Fine, you get a spike. Does a single one of those entrants open your next email?